a dream-like exaltation

“The shutting out of surrounding objects, and the concentration of the whole attention . . . produces a dream-like exaltation . . . in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits.”

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, describing the photographic stereo viewer experience in 1861. Quoted by Oliver Sachs in Stereo Sue: Why Two Eyes are Better than One, The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

startling stereoscopic relief

“Gazing at wallpaper with small repetitive motifs, [David Brewster] observed [as early as 1844] that the patterns might quiver or shift, and then jump into startling stereoscopic relief, especially if these patterns were offset in relation to one another. Such “autostereograms” have probably been experienced for millennia. . . . Medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example, contain exquisitely intricate designs done so exactingly that whole pages can be seen, with the unaided eye, as stereoscopic illusions. (John Cisne, a paleobiologist at Cornell, has suggested that such stereograms may have been “something of a trade secret among the educated elite of the seventh and eighth century British Isles.”)”

—Oliver Sachs, Stereo Sue: Why Two Eyes are Better than One, The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

conventionalized representations of concrete objects

“Writing, according to the latest theories, was invented in southern Mesopotamia for the first and perhaps the only time. The oldest written texts come from Uruk toward the end of the fourth millennium B.C. They were impressed on clay tablets with a reed stylus and then baked. The signs, though linear in form, are no longer purely pictographic, as in some of the preliterate drawings on clay, but considerably conventionalized representations of concrete objects. The new invention must have quickly proved its worth, for it apparently provided the stimlus to the beginning of pictographic writing in Egypt and Persia . . . by about 3000 [B.C.].”

—William W. Hallo & William Kelly Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History, 1971.

Mesopotamian graphics

“[Hammurabi’s] most famous remains are the somewhat overinterpreted and perhaps misnamed Code of Hammurabi. Originally, it was an eight-foot-high black basalt stele erected at the end of his reign beside a statue or possibly idol of himself. So far as we can make out, someone seeking redress from another would come to the steward’s statue, to “hear my words” (as the stele says at the bottom), and then move over to the stele itself, where the previous judgments of the stewards god are recorded. . . . [T]he top of the stele is sculptured to depict the scene of judgment-giving. The god is seated on a raised mound which in Mesopotamian graphics symbolizes a mountain. An aura of flames flashes up from his shoulders as he speaks (which has made some scholars think it is Shamash, the sun-god). Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just below him (“under-stands”). The god holds in his right hand the attributes of power, the rod and circle very common to such divine depictions. Whith these symbols, the god is just touching the left elbow of his steward, Hammurabi. One of the magnificent things about this scene is the hypnotic assurance with which both god and steward-king intently stare at each other, impassively majestic, the steward-king’s right hand held up between us, the observers, and the plane of communication. Here is no humility, no begging before a god, as occurs just a few centuries later. . . . There is only obedience. And what is being dictated . . . are judgments on a series of very specific cases.”

—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976. That last bit reminds me of the Dog Whisperer. Does anybody know what I mean?

Atrium

Central room in Roman house, often open to sky.

—Chester G. Starr, The Ancient Romans, 1971.

Codex.

A parchment volume bound like a modern book, as opposed to a papyrus roll.

—Chester G. Starr, The Ancient Romans, 1971.

Moloch.

Sacrifice especially of first-born sons in Phoenician religion. (Not a god, as often defined.)

—Chester G. Starr, The Ancient Romans, 1971.

Anthracite.

A hard, jet black, metallic-looking flammable rock that is the highest-ranking coal, the only version that can rightly be considered properly metamorphic.

—Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.

Chalk.

A soft, porous, and fine-grained limestone, characteristically white in color, most memorably found in the cliffs of southern Kent—“the white cliffs of Dover.”

—Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.

Iron pyrite.

A metallic-looking sulfide of iron, known jocularly as fool’s gold.

—Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001. This guy is so jocular!